Local author Mike Due

Mike Due is a local author who has penned the first of what he plans on being a trilogy of stories set, in part, at his alma mater, Northern Kentucky University. Immaterial: Book 1: Discovery is part science fiction, part faith and all thought-provoking. Mark Perzel talks with the author about his self-published first book and his plans for the rest of the trilogy.

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Back in the 1890’s, Pearl Bryan was brutally murdered in one of the more grisly, yet fascinating, crimes in Kentucky history. That story is now recounted by author James McDonald in his book The Perils of Pearl Bryan, and he’s on the phone Lee Hay to discuss this story.

It is estimated that there are 775 million people around the world who can’t read. Former Microsoft senior executive John Wood tell his story of starting a worldwide literacy effort in his book Creating Room to Read and he speaks by phone with our Barbara Gray to share this amazing story. Room to Read is now operating programs all over Asia and Africa.

Alexandra Horowitz, author of the New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog, has recently published a fascinating look at the world around us with the help of additional sets of eyes. On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes recounts 11 walks, mostly through her New York neighborhood, accompanied by a different expert: geologist, urban sociologist, sound designer, child, and others. She details what they see and what they hear, and how that’s different than what she sees and hears. She’s on the phone with Thane Maynard to talk about this fascinating experiment and ultimately what she learns from it. She also mentions a study of human-dog play that is accepting videos through Sunday night.

She’s known across the internet as The Bloggess, who claims (tongue-in-cheek?) “Like Mother Theresa, only better.” Her name is Jenny Lawson, and her blog is one of the most read, most hiliarious sites on the web, and she recently published a book titled Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir.) Our Tana Weingartner talks with The Bloggess about how she got started, the reaction to her blog, and why she decided to do a book on top of all this other writing.